Computing systems have become an integral part of business, government, and most other aspects of modern life. Most people are likely regrettably familiar with poor performing computer systems. A poor performing computer system may be simply poorly designed and, therefore, fundamentally incapable of performing well. Even well-designed systems will perform poorly, however, if inadequate resources are not available to meet the demands placed upon the systems. Properly matching the resources available to a system with the demand placed upon the system requires both accurate capacity planning and adequate system testing to predict the resources that will be necessary for the system to function properly at the loads expected for the system. Additionally, after the system is in production, continual monitoring of capacity and load metrics validates the pre-production planning while also indicating when more resources are required.
Measuring the load that is placed upon a system may involve a number of issues, and this measurement may be performed in a variety of ways. For example, system performance metrics such as system availability and load may be tracked continuously or periodically during operation by software or hardware-based measurement mechanisms. Most of these mechanisms reside on the monitored system and thus require system access by a user who would like to view the system performance metrics.
Due to system security concerns, it may be undesirable to allow all users to access all monitored systems in order to view and report system performance metrics. It is often difficult to limit security access to only allow reporting system metrics without permitting the user to access other data and applications residing on the monitored system. By permitting a user to report system metrics from a database, security access to monitored systems is not required.